Paper Proposal

Ed Bull
LIT 6009 – Research Portfolio
Paper Proposal
(499 words)


Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark set up the whiteness of dominant white culture as a blank slate defined by difference against a backdrop of Africanist presence. Her profound look at an identity constructed and used as an engine for self-justification and self-appreciation through negative emphasis—projecting qualities onto the Other that emphasize the reverse on the dominant culture—transforms the way that one looks at any novel that does significant work with identity, and much more at one that spends its bulk considering it.

My paper will examine the role of Other-ing in The Algerine Captive in the light of Toni Morrison’s explanation of whiteness defined by difference, through several close readings. In the novel, Tyler introduces the Algerines as a new factor into the White / Black binary. While dark-skinned, they are decidedly not African Americans, and so constitute an other Other. The white captive, in this case Updike Underhill, can then reconfigure his identity politics from White / Black to something more akin to American / Foreign Enemy, creating an inclusive fold within the white identity for African Americans, and justifying his abolitionist position. It’s no coincidence that the bulk of the first volume is spent as a picaresque, coming-of-age search for identity. When Updike truly cements his own self-image and dispositions is when he comes into contact with the Algerines, an experience that affirms his faith, patriotism, and sense of self. It’s no surprise, then, that when the other Other presence of the Algerines is removed that he loses the strength of his abolitionist convictions.

However, this reconfiguration carries with it certain Imperialist perogatives. This creation of an inclusive fold within the white identity necessarily assimilates the African American identity, and aggressively so. My paper will also examine the ways in which The Algerine Captive erases black identity even as it creates a place for African Americans within white identity. Additionally, the paper will examine how The Algerine Captive uses this other Other to demonstrate a type of transcendent superiority of the new white inclusive identity by reversing social roles and yet still granting the white captive the power of narrative voice and judgment, placing that power in an untouchable position above any worldly situation. Together, these reconfigurations both provide the means and justification for the culture of the white captive in the novel to absorb and erase the culture of the black slave. And, perhaps foreseeing the decline of slavery in the United States some fifty years later, they prepare the captive’s white culture for a world where the Other must be foreign and unseen to be sustainable.

It’s that last point that leads to the ways that modern, subconscious identity politics are used to justify the enslavement and subjugation of supposedly inferior cultures, whatever the situation, by a supposedly transcendently superior dominant culture. This is one of the keystones that support the oppressive and imperialistic inclinations of any group, as well as Tyler’s own subconscious undermining of his abolitionist position in The Algerine Captive.